AppWorld 2025 Security Insights - ADC 3.0, AI Security, and more

Welcome to this week’s notable security news (Feb 24–Mar 2, 2025), brought to you by Jordan_Zebor from F5 SIRT. Although our main focus is usually on emerging threats and protective measures, I recently attended F5 AppWorld 2025 in person and found it invaluable for understanding what’s next in secure application delivery. 

For those who aren’t familiar, F5 AppWorld is an in-person conference packed with sessions, hands-on labs, and networking opportunities—an ideal forum for discussing real-world challenges in securing and optimizing applications.

F5 AppWorld was especially exciting this year, with one major announcement immediately standing out: ADC 3.0—the industry’s first converged platform for application delivery and security in hybrid multicloud infrastructures. At its core, ADC 3.0 features the F5 AI Gateway, which mitigates threats like sensitive information disclosure and prompt injection, directly addressing the OWASP LLM Top 10 vulnerabilities. From our F5 SIRT perspective, this integrated traffic management and AI-specific threat protection is a big step forward in stopping sophisticated attacks before they reach critical assets.

Another key development was the new AI assistant for F5 NGINX One. Powered by a large language model trained specifically for NGINX, it offers real-time, context-aware guidance for DevOps, SecOps, NetOps, and Platform Ops teams. By reducing manual troubleshooting and configuration time, it promises noticeable improvements in both performance and security operations.

F5’s expanded VELOS hardware—including the CX1610 6-Tbps chassis and BX520 400-Gbps blade—also drew significant attention. With the ability to handle 224 million Layer 7 requests per second, VELOS provides robust defenses against large-scale DDoS attacks and other disruptive threats. In an era of escalating assaults, its high throughput and low latency are invaluable for maintaining availability.

Outside of these technical highlights, astronaut Scott Kelly’s keynote was a memorable conference moment. He offered both humor and insight on resilience and learning from failure, showing how teams can excel under pressure.

Overall, F5 AppWorld underscored the importance of having direct conversations about strong security practices and real-world application needs. Hearing customers’ challenges firsthand inspires us at F5 SIRT to continuously refine our countermeasures and strategies. For anyone looking to stay ahead of the evolving threat landscape, the innovations unveiled at AppWorld provide a glimpse into what’s possible. If you’d like to learn more, visit F5’s website or contact us directly to explore how these solutions might improve your security posture.